Thursday, May 10, 2018

Ripple coin sales increase 83 percent over previous quarter

San Franciso-based Ripple Inc. announces a huge increase in sales of its coin XRP, or ripple, during the last quarter. It sold $167.7 million worth of XRP during the first three months of this year an increase of 83 percent over the previous quarter.

Ripple sales

Compared to the first quarter of last year the increase is a whopping 2,400 percent. Ripple is well known for its XRP ledger. Unlike some cryptocoins Ripple has tried to forge links with business such as financial enterprises and provide services for them, and the XRP ledger has been helpful in that respect.

While direct sales of XRP at $16.6 million actually showed a 17 percent decline compared to the previous quarter, programmatic sales more than doubled from $71.5 million to $151.1 million.

Tom Channick, head of corporate communications for Ripple said that the sales of XRP exceeded the company's expectations and added: "As a company, our strategy remains focused on signing up customers to use our technology and moving those customers into production. If we continue to do that, we will fix how money moves around the world."

Ripple trades and clout increases

The total value of the ripple coin trade globally also increased significantly in the first quarter, growing 68 percent to reach $160 billion during the period.

In the first quarter ripple's overall share of the cryptocurrency market grew from 5.3 percent at the end of last year to 6.9 percent at the end of March. The company report notes: "While the total market capitalization of all digital assets was the same on both November 24, 2017 and March 31, 2018, XRP's share of that market capitalization doubled, rising from 3.56 percent to 7.57 percent - a continuation of a trend that first began in 2017."

Ripple's roller coaster price ride

At the end of last year RIpple began a huge rally that saw the price rise from 0.25 at the first of December to a high of $3.84 in the early days of January. However, the price dropped steeply and quickly and within a month the coin traded under a dollar.

Ripple is trading now around 0.85 cents a steep rise from the beginning of the month when it was under fifty cents. The report notes the negative effects that a global regulatory crackdown and uncertainty about the future have had on cryptocoin prices.

Programmatic selling versus direct sales

David Schwartz, Ripple's chief cryptographer on Reddit last November explained programmatic sales: "This is done by third parties that Ripple employs to use agreed algorithms to execute sales, usually by market making that is biased in favor of a net sale. Ripple does not have direct control over these sales and cannot adjust their timing on a short-term basis."

Ripple has placed 55 billion XRP in an escrow account last December in order to create certainty of supply. In Q1, Ripple released about 300 million which the company claims are being used in a variety of ways to invest in the XRP ecosystem.

New partnerships

David Schwartz, chief cryptographer for Ripple explains how useful the Ripple platform will be for making payments: "Payment systems today are where email was in the early '80s. Every provider built their own system for their customers and if people used different systems they couldn't easily interact with each other. Ripple is designed to connect different payment systems together."

From the very beginning Ripple has linked up with financial and other institutions to aid their businesses through use of the Ripple platform.

Five new partnerships have been announced by the Ripple company. The company says that the new partnerships will help the company expand the adoption of its xVia payment Application Program Interface (API). This is an application developed by the company to allow financial institutions and other businesses to send and receive money globally through the Ripple blockchain.

Earlier the companies had been using traditional transfer and remittance methods.

Businesses are using various ways of sending and receiving payments worldwide as e-commerce fluorishes especially in emerging markets. The entire world is moving towards digitalization which makes sending and making payments much easier due to blockchain technology. Ripple's vision is to unify a fragmented system and allow money to be moved as quickly and seamlessly as information is spread across the globe.

Official sources say of the xVia system that it is for indivduals as well as corporations who want to send money across the world though a standard inferface. As it stands now, different countries are using different methods to do so. The xVia system hopes to be cheaper and faster with less of a chance of error

The new partners

The five company partners are: FairFX (UK); RationalFX (UK), Exchange4Free (UK); UniPay (Georgia) and Money Match (Malaysia). The five will adopt xVia to use for fast, reliable, and secure global money transfers. Foreign exchange platforms and e-wallet platforms are now adopting the system. Earlier, Ripple had formed partnerships with Santander and MoneyGram to use the system.

Ripple hopes to form new partnerships and eventually become a leading financial network. These expanding partnerships should help the XRP coin gain more in market value.